Technology

It’s been a few months since the wife and I cut the cable cord. We’ve gotten into a new groove with media consumption and I thought I’d post an update for those who are considering making the move. Plus, everyone who comes over to our house wants to know all about the Roku, so I’ll get into that below.
Not much has really changed
The wife and I have always watched more films than TV shows (I’m not a big fan of lawyer/doctor/cop/reality shows). After cutting...

As I’ve said before, I’m a big fan of RSS feeds. If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, then click here. Using RSS aggregators like Google Reader and the myriad feed-reading apps can simplify your news consumption and save countless hours. I actually have my feeds set up in newspaper-style categories, sorted by topics that are relevant to me from sources that I trust. It’s like my own personal e-newspaper delivered exactly when I feel like reading it.
Being a news...

Thanks to an unexpected windfall, I finally sank some money into a quality camera. When you consider how many pictures the wife and I take and post online, it’s amazing that we didn’t do this earlier. Our old point-and-shoot was an adequate little workhorse for a few years, but it’s not much better than the pictures we can take with our smartphones these days (which are average at best).
After a lot of research, we ended up getting a great deal on a Nikon D5100 DSLR from...

In the months since I announced I’d be cutting the cable cord at the end of 2012, I’ve done a lot of research. There are so many services currently vying to embody the natural progression from cable to internet that it’s a bit overwhelming. It’s kind of like the string of gas, electric, and steam-powered automobiles that flooded the market at the turn of the last century. Then, as now, it was impossible to see which platform would be the one that everyone would...

Even though I’ve received some exceptional service from Charter over the last couple of years, the wife and I have decided to cut the cable cord at the end of this year. We currently pay over $180 per month for bundled cable, telephone, and internet. That’s a ridiculous amount of money on its own, but when you add in our monthly smartphone bills, it’s a shameful first-world problem.
There are a lot of reasons to make a change. We barely get any calls to our home phone, we...

I’m not really an early adopter when it comes to technology. I like to wait to see which platforms look like they’ll stick around a while before investing my hard-earned dollars. To my surprise, I’ve grown to be very patient when it comes to letting the market sort out the winners and losers. I’ve done this with the cellphone market as well as with computers/multimedia. I actually kept a Startac flip phone until 2005.
Cell phones today are really just microcomputers...

Like I said in my previous posts (part 1, part 2) I’ve been waiting for several years to pull the trigger on a Home Theater Personal Computer (HTPC) set-up. I wanted to fit everything ‘multimedia’ into a custom console in my den that kept my entire system streamlined, organized, and hidden from sight. This is how it all turned out. I’m very pleased with how clean the design looks in the room.
These pictures aren’t great. I think I got some dust on the camera lens...

Like I said before, I used the dimensions of my new Home Theater Personal Computer (HTPC) components to sketch out a plan for a multimedia console that would allow cool air into the storage space, block most of the light from bleeding into the rest of the room, and neatly store everything without showing any wires. This was my plan. My measurements had to be cut down by a couple of inches during the build, but I stayed pretty true to the original design.
Here’s all of the lumber. Since...

Most people who read my blog posts subscribe via email or RSS. That means they won’t notice the website redesign unless they make an effort to drop by. I loved the look of the old site, but I’ve been considering moving to a more professional layout as I take on more marketing consulting and web design work. WordPress recently put out another update that conflicted with my old layout. Rather than pore over the update code and tinker with the CSS to fix the error, I decided it was...

I’ve finally moved into the 21st century and bought a smart phone. It’s the new Motorola Droid:
It runs Google’s second-generation Android operating system and is on the Verizon network. This thing is pretty cool. It has a 5 megapixel camera with a flash, turn-by-turn navigation and a slide-out qwerty keyboard:
Of course, it has two virtual keyboards as well, but the slide out one comes in handy when you have to type something with lots of letters, numbers and symbols,...

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the quality of the pictures on this site has degraded over the past year. Specifically, the sharpness of the pictures is has been falling off (examples here). Our camera is about 5 years old, and it just doesn’t have the right stuff anymore. Every time I take pictures of a project I’m working on, I have to take them from several different anglers on several different camera settings, hoping that a few of them turn out sharp and in...

I mentioned the other day that no one ever notices the old safe we use as a side table in our den. The opposite is true of our rotary phone:
I inherited this classic phone from my Grandmother. If you look closely, you’ll see it still has her old typewritten number on the dial:
We have a couple of cordless phones in the house, but we keep the ringers turned off so that the only sound comes from the bell in this phone. It’s fun to watch adults play with the dial like it’s...